President Obama has bowed to pressure and announced a formal investigation into Russian hacking aimed at influencing the recent presidential election.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz announced on Friday that the Obama administration would seek to have the report wrapped up before President-elect Donald Trump takes office in …

The UK government’s first annual report on the implementation of the 2015 National Security Strategy has reaffirmed that cyber-security remains a key priority.
The 39 page report (pdf) lists cyber-security alongside Russia’s actions in Syria and Ukraine and terrorism as among the greatest threats Britain faces.
The range of …

Having chosen a climate-change denier to head the US government's environment agency, an opponent of minimum wage for the Labor Department, a creationist for Education Secretary, a mine-owner for Commerce, and a wrestling exec to oversee small businesses – president-elect Donald Trump is now considering putting a man with very …

In a speech to a right-wing think tank, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai explained how 2017 will be the year that net neutrality dies in the US, and that municipal networks can forget about existing as well.
On Wednesday, Pai gave a speech at the Free State Foundation in which he lambasted the FCC for taking on more responsibility …

A White House commission on improving cybersecurity has come up with a list of recommendations for US president-elect Donald Trump’s administration – including a target for no big hacks to involve identity-based compromises.
The US Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity has identified 16 key recommendations on security …

The president of the European Patent Office has responded to a formal rebuke of efforts to impose his will on the organization by asking for more power.
The man who last week was called a disgrace to his country in the French National Assembly has been accused of targeting EPO staff who opposed his reforms and of running sham …

SpaceX has delayed its planned December launch until January 2017.
Its brief statement is given as an “anomaly update” – an addendum to the rolling blog about investigations into its impressively-large explosion on September 1.
That event has since been attributed to how helium was handled during fuelling. The explosion …

The world's largest tech distributor is now privately owned by the Chinese: shipping titan Tianjin Tianhai has coughed a whopping $6bn to take over US-based Ingram Micro.
The transaction, made public in February, was held up earlier in the year after the Shanghai Stock Exchange sought answers over financial implications for …

Comment
The quest for freedom from US technologies and patent fees has been a persistent theme in China and has helped shape the new mobile landscape, in which Baidu and Alibaba, not Google and Amazon, dominate the user experience. Less is heard about another massive market, Russia, but here too, the push for technology self-sufficiency …

Analysis
Blighty's freshly passed Investigatory Powers Act, better known as the Snoopers' Charter, is a dog's dinner of a law. It gives virtually unrestricted powers not only to State spy organisations but also to the police and a host of other government agencies.
The operation of the oversight and accountability mechanisms in the IPA …

Printer security is so awful HP Inc is willing to shut off shiny features and throw its own dedicated bodies at the perennial problem.
The tech giant is offering the professional security services under its new and far-harder-than-before "Secure Managed Print Services" offering unveiled today.
Security types will also provide …

A teardown analysis of the Samsung Note 7 claims that the ill-fated phablet was doomed by a design flaw that squeezed its battery pack to unsafe pressure levels.
Anna Shedletsky, CEO of engineering software developer Instrumental, said her team's teardown analysis of the Note 7 found that the smartphone's tendency to explode …

CloudFlare has warned of another massive botnet that appears to be ramping up and targeting the US West Coast.
In a blog post, the content delivery network said it has been watching a flood of attack traffic that started two weeks ago and appears to have been coming from one person testing out its abilities before moving it to …

For the first time in more than two years, a Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo has been unclipped from its carrier.
The VSS Unity glided for 10 minutes under its own control, after being released from WhiteKnightTwo, after a previous four “captive carry” test flights.
Virgin Galactic says the Saturday flight over the Mojave desert …

Apple's long-rumoured interest in autonomous vehicles appears to be real.
The company seems to have written to United States' National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to comment on its Federal Automated Vehicles Policy.
A widely-circulated letter signed by “Apple's director of product integrity Steve Kenner”, …

President of the European Patent Office (EPO) Benoit Battistelli is a disgrace to his country, the French National Assembly heard Wednesday.
"La présence du Français Benoît Battistelli à la tête de l’Office nuit aujourd’hui gravement à l’image de notre pays," stated MP Philip Cordery in an address to the secretary of state for …

A group of venture capitalists are asking US President-elect Donald Trump to implement a series of tax cuts and policies they say will bring more funding for startups.
In a letter (PDF) to the real-estate mogul turned-politician, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) asks for tax breaks for ventural capital companies …

Britain's new aircraft carrier will operate as a fully fledged offshoot of the US Marine Corps, the UK's ambassador to the US accidentally confirmed on Thursday.
The 70,000-ton HMS Queen Elizabeth will sail through the South China Sea on her maiden deployment in the 2020s, Sir Kim Darroch told a Washington think tank.
Reuters …

Analysis
The Mirai botnet has struck again, with hundreds of thousands of TalkTalk and Post Office broadband customers affected. The two ISPs join a growing casualty list from a wave of assaults that have also affected customers at Deutsche Telekom, KCOM and Irish telco Eir over the last two weeks or so.
Problems at the Post Office …

Supporters of net neutrality are preparing to defend FCC regulations passed two years ago in the face of what is increasingly looking like a determined effort by the Trump Administration to undermine them.
Earlier this week, Trump named a third person to his FCC transition team and, as with the previous two, she is a vocal …

Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a nice claim today: it can cut the time to lob operational tech (IoT devices) on to a network and the cost of doing so – the blockers, it said, to wider enterprise and industrial adoption.
The big questions the company didn't answer in a particularly convincing way were how much the new bundle …

It's something many Americans have talked about – moving to Canada to escape President Donald Trump – but now the Internet Archive is preparing to do just that.
"On November 9th in America, we woke up to a new administration promising radical change," reads a blog post from the organization's founder, Brewster Kahle. "It was a …

Microsoft has confirmed that it censors its Chinese language digital assistant.
Last week, China Digital Times reported how the Xiaoice chatbot was avoiding certain topics that are known to be sensitive to the Chinese government, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, nicknames for president Xi Jinping, and even Donald …

More than 40 cities in California are considering a tax on streaming services – dubbed a Netflix tax – claiming that the tax system needs updating for the internet era.
The news comes as AT&T announces a new streaming service, DirectTV Now, which the company hopes will see people discard their cable boxes altogether for over …

Analysis
When the first fixed-line phone systems were installed, you paid for everything, but particularly for each minute of each call.
Later they had broadband added to the copper and a flat rate began to become the order of the day. As phone calls went to IP, the same applied to calls for the most part. While there are upper limits …

Time is ticking away if you want to enter NASA's competition for the public to suggest an astronaut ablution solution.
While the PR team must be delighted with their title of "Space Poop Challenge" the more officious procurement language of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is even sweeter:
NASA seeks …

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has proposed voluntary guidelines [PDF] designed to reduce driver distraction by mobile devices in vehicles.
According to the NHTSA, about 10 per cent of the 35,092 traffic fatalities in 2015 – 3,477 people – involved one or more distracted drivers. This represents an 8.8 …

Senior US senators have expressed concern that the FBI is not being clear about how it intends to use its enhanced powers to spy on American citizens.
Those are the spying powers granted by Congressional inaction over an update to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. These changes will kick in on December 1 …

Billionaire contrarian and Donald Trump fancier Peter Thiel is reportedly having little success trying to get Silicon Valley to choke down its values and join a tech transition team designed to help the president-elect get up to speed.
According to the Washington Post, the blood-guzzling billionaire has been touring the Bay …

Leading Democrat senators are pushing the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to address a number of hot topics, including zero rating and the use of the Stingray cellphone-tracking technology, before the Trump Administration takes over in January.
In a letter [PDF] sent Friday, seven senators including Elizabeth Warren …

In a world of complex technologies and unforgiving business environments, simplicity in IT is good.
Technology teams want to get the job done with as little fuss – and as little drain on management resources – as possible. Hyperconvergence promises to deliver that simplicity, but how does it differ from more traditional …

Eir, Ireland's largest ISP, has tens of thousands of customers with insecure ADSL2+ modems that appear to be vulnerable to remote takeover.
Earlier this month, a security researcher writing under the name "kenzo" has posted a proof-of-concept exploit that demonstrates how an attacker might take control of an Eir D1000 modem. …

President-elect Donald Trump has hired two strong opponents of net neutrality rules to head up his transition team for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Economist Jeff Eisenach, who worked in the Reagan Administration at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and does a lot of corporate work for Verizon, and Mark …

Comment
Chinese officials have cited the Facebook “Fake News panic” as a justification for further clampdowns on internet speech and anonymity.
Mark Zuckerberg emerged as the latest scapegoat for the victory of Donald Trump last week.
Ren Xianling, No.2 at the Cyberspace Administration of China, said internet users posting false …

Comment
As in every sector of US life, the telecoms industry is trying to work out what the shock election of maverick candidate Donald Trump to the presidency will mean for its operators and suppliers.
There are few clues, of course – telecoms, even broadband, were not major campaign issues; Trump obviously has no track record of …

NASA meteorologists have given a 90 per cent chance of good weather for the launch of the revolutionary Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite – R Series (GOES‑R) on Saturday.
GOES-R is possibly the most advanced weather satellite ever produced, capable of providing high-definition, multi-spectrum snapshots of …

Amazon is planning to open five new solar power farms to help run its AWS cloud data centers.
The five latest facilities will be located in Virginia and will feed electricity to the US East regional cloud centers in Virginia and Ohio.
Amazon said the new panels will be set up in New Kent, Buckingham, Sussex, Powhatan, and …

Versus16
Silicon Valley should work with the US government in Washington to arrive at a solution that gives law enforcement access to encrypted comms, but that respects individual privacy.
That's according to former White House counterterrorism and cybersecurity official Daniel Rosenthal, who was debating where the issue of encryption …

Videos
James Clapper, who as Director of National Intelligence was economical with the truth when it came to acknowledging US domestic surveillance activities subsequently revealed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, has announced his resignation.
Clapper isn't resigning over lies, but instead because it's traditional for heads like …

Analysis
No wonder America’s biggest lobbyist, Google, has been so frantic to drive through its agenda this year.
Whether it was making an audacious landgrab for the TV industry, locking the Copyright chief out of her office, stopping ISPs from doing what Google does with your personal data, or taking the songs away from America’s …

Big Blue's big boss, Ginni Rometty, is hoping to dance on the tightrope that Big Orange has brought to the White House.
Trump's unexpected election puts the technology industry in a tight spot, because many associate it with the economic conditions Trump exploited throughout his campaign. Globalisation demonised as a destroyer …

"ProtonMail follows the Swiss policy of neutrality. We do not take any position for or against Trump," the Swiss company's CEO stated on Monday, before revealing that new user sign-ups immediately doubled following Trump's election victory.
ProtonMail has published figures showing that as soon as the election results rolled in …

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is finally being questioned by prosecutors more than six years after he was first accused of rape in Sweden.
Ingrid Isgren, Sweden's deputy chief prosecutor, arrived at the Ecuadorian Embassy this morning, according to The Guardian, ending a stalemate which began in 2012 when the South American …

Despite plans by president-elect Donald Trump to repatriate American multinationals' funds, Ireland's corporate tax advantage over the US is likely to persist.
According to Stephen Moore, a senior economic advisor to Trump, Ireland will retain its corporate tax advantage over the United States, reported The Irish Times.
In an …

Register Roundtable
Sometimes technology visions bubble along under the radar, quite often scorned then, following a change of name or emphasis, ubiquitous. Utility computing became the cloud, and we know how that’s taken off. Groupware became collaboration. Thin clients have morphed into VDI, and… Well, seems like a good time to get a bunch of …

Google has responded to the European Commission's complaint that it is abusing its market power with the Android mobile phone operating system by griping that Microsoft and Apple are worse.
The ad and search giant points out in a neat animated GIF that of the 39 bundled apps on an iPhone, all 39 of them stem from Apple; on a …

Comment
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is almost certainly dead. Or at least America's role in it is.
The much-maligned trade agreement that took seven years to draw up and simplifies trading rules between nations in the Pacific Rim – Australia, Canada, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore and a number of others – hit fierce …

Special report
A looming set of changes to the macOS has some administrators worried that the way they manage and configure Apple systems will need switching up.
Those changes, which have only been partly revealed by Apple, will see a new file system implemented in the OS and, in the process, a lockdown of key components of the operating …

Comment
If comments made on the campaign trail by Donald Trump were sincere, then today's British government will need to do some serious soul-searching very soon.
Trump, who was today announced as the president-elect of the United States of America, has been controversially outspoken while seeking to be nominated as the Republican …

A judge in Nevada has thrown out a lawsuit from a lawyer representing Donald Trump, arguing that she would not order the release of election poll worker information due to "Twitter trolls."
"There will no harassment," argued Brian Hardy, the campaign's lawyer, who wants the details about people present at an early-voting poll …